Burn our planet or face financial meltdown. Not much of a choice. The Guardian 20130421

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/carbon-problems-financial-crisis-hutton
The world is going to fry – unless there is change soon. There is weakening political will to make national and international targets for carbon reduction stick, no strong business and financial coalition prepared to lead and a weakening groundswell of public opinion prepared to foot the bill.
Instead, the international consensus of 25 years ago – that the world must act to challenge climate change – is dissolving. Individual countries are trying to steal a march on each other in a race to the bottom, dropping whatever scant penalties there have been for burning fossil fuels.


Western people will sooner or later agitate for change, as will China's millions as pollution makes its cities unbearable. Nobody wants a return to the command and control economies that failed. What is needed is a new vision of how to do capitalism in which enlightened self-interest is hard-wired into its operation, saving us from decades of austerity and environmental disaster. There are instruments at hand – the Unburnable Carbon report sets some of them out – and they mesh with larger arguments for stakeholder capitalism. The political task is to bind them together to underpin a new consensus and a new narrative. There is no time to lose.

Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis – report. The Guardian 20130419

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/19/carbon-bubble-financial-crash-crisis
The world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to leading Economists.

ithaka-journal for ecology. winegrowing and climate farming

http://www.ithaka-journal.net/inhalt/klimafarming?lang=en

Biochar – a key technology for the planet     

Sweco

http://www.sweco.se/sv/Sweden/Losningar/
Sweco sätter kunskap om samhällsbyggnad i ett större sammanhang. Det är så vi skapar hållbara värden för våra kunder och för slutanvändaren. Sweco har marknadens bredaste tjänsteutbud inom samhällsbyggnad. När vi sätter kundens projekt i ett större sammanhang kan vi åstadkomma lösningar som är hållbara ur ett miljömässigt, socialt och ekonomiskt perspektiv.

Cutting Short-lived Pollutants Can Slow Sea Level Rise. Climate central 20130414

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-cutting-short-lived-pollutants-can-slow-sea-level-rise-15877

A new study finds that it is possible to greatly slow the rate of sea level rise, which is one of the biggest threats global warming poses, by cutting so-called “short-lived climate pollutants,” which warm the climate on timescales of a few weeks to a decade, in combination with reductions in long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).

Kommentar: Detta kan vara ett starkt stöd för att minska kornas metan utsläpp genom att blanda biokol i ensilaget.

China Confirms Their Warming is Human Caused. climate central 20130413

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/chinas-warming-is-from-human-causes-15865?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+climatecentral/djOO+Climate+Central+-+Full+Feed

By Tim Radford, Climate News Network

LONDON — Chinese scientists have just confirmed that greenhouse gas emissions have sent the thermometer soaring in one country — China.
This is, they say, the first study to directly link warmer daily minimum and maximum temperatures with climate change in one single nation, rather than on a global or hemispheric scale.

“There is a warming in extreme temperatures over China, and this warming cannot be explained by natural variation”, said Wen. “It can only be explained by anthropogenic external forcings. These findings indicate very clearly that climate change is not just an abstract number for the globe; it is evident at regional scale.”
He said he expected warming to continue, as the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere continued to exert their influence. “This will have huge implications for China, as heat waves and drought have already become more and more of an issue in our country.
“We should expect more hardship for dry-land farming as water supply is already stressed, higher demand on energy for cooling, and increasing heat-induced health issues.”

When will the summer arctic be nearly sea ice free?

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50316/abstract

By: James E. Overland, Muyin Wang

Geophysical Research Letters

Abstract

[1] The observed rapid loss of thick, multi-year sea ice over the last seven years and September 2012 Arctic sea ice extent reduction of 49 % relative to the 1979-2000 climatology are inconsistent with projections of a nearly sea ice free summer Arctic from model estimates of 2070 and beyond made just a few years ago. Three recent approaches to predictions in the scientific literature are: 1) extrapolation of sea ice volume data, 2) assuming several more rapid loss events such as 2007 and 2012, and 3) climate model projections. Time horizons for a nearly sea ice free summer for these three approaches are roughly 2020 or earlier, 2030± 10 yrs, and 2040 or later. Loss estimates from models are based on a subset of the most rapid ensemble members. It is not possible to clearly choose one approach over another as this depends on the relative weights given to data versus models. Observations and citations support the conclusion that most Global Climate Models results in the CMIP5 archive are too conservative in their sea ice projections. Recent data and expert opinion should be considered in addition to model results to advance the very likely timing for future sea ice loss to the first half of the 21^st century, with a possibility of major loss within a decade or two.